Barack Obama's life story contains 'myth, not truth', says biographer. So why did the media report it as truth?

We all live a mixture of myth and reality. Our identities are constructed out of handed down “tall tales” of ancestors who fought the good fight at the Battle of the Boyne, ghostwrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, or single-handedly sank the Bismark. Everyone does it, even Presidents of the United States.

David Maraniss’s biography of Barack Obama is out and it questions the accuracy of the President’s personal story – so much so that Maraniss describes it as “received myth, not the truth.” Maraniss is no Tea Party partisan. Aside from being a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, he conducted a lengthy interview with Obama himself and warned him in advance of the inaccuracies that he would be reporting. The President conceded that some of his biography was gleaned from the failing memories of family members and may not be 100 percent true.

The young Obama that emerges from Maraniss’s book is complex and likeable. At college he smoked clove cigarettes in the style of a doobie, idled around in his red Fiat, lived on bowls of cereal, knew how to charm a lady, and used Brut spray deodorant. He was, in short, a regular guy. Interestingly he also carried around a worn copy of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a novel about an African-American’s struggle for identity in a postwar America that barely regards him as a human being. The book speaks to Obama’s anxiety about his own identity, made all the more complex by his Indonesian influences. Indeed, for all the spice cigarettes, sarongs and curries, Obama emerges as someone equally trapped between America and the Pacific as a man dealing with the historical trauma of the African-American experience. That said, Maraniss concludes that Obama actually received minimal contact with Islam: “His [grandfather’s] life was more directly shaped by Christian missionaries, and he had no qualms sending his own son, Barack Obama (Sr.), to Christian schools. Moreover, Barry never met [his grandfather], but spent most of his childhood with his white grandfather, Stan Dunham, who was raised a Baptist and became a Methodist in Vernon, Texas. Barack Obama, the father of the future president, was not a Muslim but an atheist.”

Something that might have sustained Obama during his youth – and something that he returned to during his runs for office – were a number of myths about his family. Maraniss sheds some light on them. For one, some conservatives leapt on Obama’s claims that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango, was detained and tortured by the British during the Kenyan emergency. That’s what turned him against Britain, said Newt Gingrich, along with the entire Capitalist/Imperialist project. In fact, Maraniss turned up no evidence for the story and concluded that it was “unlikely” that it ever happened at all. Nor was Obama's Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, killed by Dutch soldiers.

Then there’s the multicultural romance between Obama’s father and mother. In his 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama said, “My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” In his 2008 convention speech, he opened, “Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story – of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.”

Alas, the truth is more ordinary, more sad. Maraniss recounts that most of Barack Obama Snr’s friends didn’t know about Ann Dunham (Barack’s mother) or the pregnancy, suggesting that the family wasn’t nearly that tight. Important details like where Ann and young Barack lived are messy. On their wedding, Maraniss can only provide this one footnote: “Marriage facts recorded in divorce records.” The consensus is that Ann left the philandering Obama Snr, not the other way around, as recounted by Obama Jnr.

Does any of this matter? At face value, no. In 2012, Romney is running against Obama the President rather than Obama the Story, so much of Maraniss’s research comes too late. The core truth of the Obama story – that he is a bridge between white Middle America and the black diaspora – is unchanged and retains its emotional power. Moreover, what new details come to light generally increase one’s sympathy for the President as a man. His background was even tougher and more confused than we thought.

What does matter is that Obama’s earlier biographers missed all this stuff. And those biographies were by serious journalists: New Yorker’s David Remnick, New York Times’ Janny Scott, Boston Globe’s Sally Jacobs and the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor. If it had come out in 2008 that aspects of Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father weren’t entirely accurate, we might have had a different election. After all, the 2008 primaries were incredibly close.

Recall the response to James Frey’s 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces. It was elevated to the bestseller lists by Oprah Winfrey; but when it was discovered that Frey had altered characters and situations, he was blasted by Oprah on live TV and his reputation destroyed. What Frey did in his book went way beyond what Obama did, but that wouldn’t have mattered. In the febrile state of Noughties politics – when Hillary Clinton was savaged for claiming that she had walked through enemy fire and Palin was accused of banning books as a former librarian – Maraniss’s research might have had a real impact by picking holes in Obama’s much celebrated credibility. The opportunity to vet was lost. That was probably because much of the mainstream media wasn’t interested in doing it.